Who’s Got The Visa Power

Businessweek has an interesting yet nothing-new story on visas for high-skilled workers in the United States. The program is known as H-1B visas and it was initially created to allow local American companies to hire talent from around the world in fields where the man power is in short supply.

In stead the program ended up being a bigger better hit with India based companies. You can’t argue with numbers. Top six out of ten applicants were from there. Total of top eight companies out of ten are India based.

This is nothing new. We have been seeing similar statistics for couple of years now.

Critics such as Grassley and Durbin charge that the outsourcers are abusing the U.S. program. The work visas, they say, are supposed to be used to bolster the U.S. economy. The idea is that companies like Microsoft, Google (GOOG), or IBM (IBM) can use them to hire software programmers or computer scientists with rare skills, fostering innovation and improving competitiveness. Instead, critics say, companies such as Infosys and Wipro are undermining the American economy by wiping out jobs. The companies bring low-cost workers to the U.S., train them in the offices of U.S. clients, and then rotate them back home after a year or two so they can provide tech support and other services from abroad. “Valuable high-tech jobs are on a one-way superhighway overseas,” said Durbin in an e-mail.

Bill Gates is scheduled to testify at the capitol hill and going by his past views, he is most likely to ask for a drastic increase in numbers as well some sort of over haul to the program which would grant citizenship faster the alien skilled workers.